Beyond the Scope of Preservation? - On the life and potential national heritage protection of early Danish and Norwegian mass housing

Abstract

Rikke Stenbro is a Danish art historian based in Oslo. As a heritage researcher and urbanist her work is both theory and praxis focused on the way in which architectural interventions address the temporal texture of urban sites and situations. For the last few years she has been increasingly interested in the built fabric of the recent past and in addressing architectural preservation from a large-scale perspective. Suburban and urban landscapes, mass housing, infrastructural systems and the coexistence and interrelatedness between them are thus central points of interest in her research and in the various planning and development projects she has been involved in as a consultant. While writing this article Stenbro held a position as senior researcher at NIKU (Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research) she has since then taken up a position as senior advisor within urbanism and cultural heritage at Rambøll, Norway. rikke.stenbro@ramboll.no Svava Riesto is a Norwegian art historian based in Copenhagen. Her research is concerned with how different values and cultural ideas influence the way that the city is understood -and how it is changed. She s is interested in a broad range of practices where people change the urban landscape, such as design, planning, heritage management, legislation and vernacular practices. Svava Riesto's work encompasses both examination of existing discourses/practices and proposals for alternative readings/prospects. Her current research examines how large-scale modern housing areas are understood and transformed in contemporary preservation-and urban renewal projects. Svava Riesto is postdoc research fellow at the Dept. of Landscape architecture and planning, the University of Copenhagen. For the last 10 years she has also been advising private and public partners in projects about urban design, urban renewal and urban transformation.

Regeneration of Panel Housing Estates from the Perspective of Thermal Technology, Sustainability and Environmental Context (Case Study of the City of Ostrava, Czech Republic)

“…The Scandinavian countries take a positive approach to the issue of prefab residential housing and housing estates. They consider this form of mass housing to be a very good example of "the physical manifestation of the Scandinavian concept of the welfare state" [44]. The architecture of the Danish and Swedish housing estates in the 1950s was based on the qualities of vernacular humanist modernism; their architecture of construction was successful and based on social, cultural, and societal needs, coming from a different way of thinking than that of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.…”

“…In Denmark, for example, the Bellahøj housing estate in Copenhagen is characterised by a residential complex of buildings built in both brick and panel technology. The same applies in the UK to London's Alexandra Road Estate in Camden with its concrete terrace houses [45][46][47][48][49].…”